8. Creating Content for Social Media

It is one thing to be well versed in how to engage in conversation; it is quite another to be a good conversationalist.

The art of conversation is about having something meaningful to say. And what is true in face-to-face conversation is certainly true in social media. If you don’t have something interesting to add to the conversation, then people will stop listening—and stop visiting your site.

The following tips will help you build better content for more engaging—and ultimately profitable—social media conversations.

Reading Minds

Approaching the subject of providing better content for a social media conversation is an easy thing to suggest, but how do you go about actually doing it?

One great way to figure out what to say is figuring out what your visitors want when they come to your company Web site, blog, or social media site. Doing this is easier than you might think, and you won’t have to be a mind reader to do so.

When visitors come to your site, they usually show up by typing your website directly into the URL bar of their browser, following a link from another site, or running a search for some term in a search engine and finding content on your site that closely matches what they are looking for.

It is this last kind of entry into your site, known as an organic search, that will help you figure out what content is most interesting to your visitors now, and what will usually be interesting to them in the future.

Here’s how this generally works. Let’s say you have a typical website for your organization, a hardware store. Some time in the recent past, you decided to try to provide some helpful tips on how to do home maintenance. You wrote out some instructions, posted a few pictures to help illustrate the how-tos, and put them on your website.

Now, after some time, let’s say you have a chance to look at the incoming traffic for individual pages on your site, and you notice that the traffic numbers for your clever method of replacing a screen on a window are significantly larger. Apparently, this is a very popular topic.

In fact, after further analysis, it turns out that this one Web page is among the top 10 sources of information for screen replacement, consistently placing at the top of search engines’ first page of results for the term “screen replacement,” and pretty high for “home repair.” By happenstance, you’ve just walked into every Web marketer’s dream: a natural hit.

So what do you do with it? If you’re wise, you’ll build on this and start adding similar content on your site, in the hopes that people who came for the first how-to might click around and see what other content gems you have.

This is search engine optimization (SEO) 101, which anyone with online marketing experience would be able to teach you. But the element of SEO that worked to boost your main website’s traffic flow can also be of assistance in creating your social media conversations.

Most analytics tools, such as the free-of-charge Google Analytics, can provide insight into what’s bringing your visitors into your business website. By tapping into your tool, such as the Matched Search Queries page, you can see what search terms people are using to find you.

From such information, you should be able to find some topics that would interest incoming readers and get them to listen to you. This can also be applied to your social media content. If you note that a lot of people are coming to your site looking for information about a particular topic, then you can start framing social media conversations around that topic and related ones.

But beware: don’t get tempted to stray too far from your core business. If you notice that a lot of people seem interested in a topic that’s only vaguely related to your organization, don’t let the tail wag the dog and change your business focus to match social needs. If your business needs to drastically shift its focus like that, then you will need a lot more data than some social media and Web analytics to make that call.

Another key point is not to place too much emphasis on this sort of research. While it can be useful to understand what potential audience members and customers are looking for, don’t make these topics the sole focus of your social media content. Man, as it were, was not meant to live by window screening alone.

Building Content

Different social media outlets have different approaches to conveying information, so you need to provide content in specific ways. Let’s take a look at the three text-based social media outlets—blogging, social network sites, and microblogging—and explore how to succeed in each one.

Blogging

Blogging is probably the most free-form social media outlet that you will have. Structured around the concept of a daily online journal, blogs have become one of the primary conduits of information on the Internet today.

Blogs are not just useful because they’re easy to set up and maintain (though that’s a big part of it). Blogs also have a lot of features that make them very social.

Most blogs have comments, where readers can chime in on your news and views, and you can respond back, so right away they can be the actual place where the conversation can happen and continue in subsequent blog entries.

Links to other content—especially other blogs—make up another useful tool. If you link to someone else’s content, it is possible that eventually that person will see the inbound traffic coming in from your blog. If he is seeing a lot of traffic, he may see what you had to say, and perhaps start the discussion on a blog-to-blog level.

When you are thinking about content for your blog, here are some guidelines for blog writing:

• Tell stories. Everyone loves a good story. Stories have been used since we figured out language as a way to convey information to each other. If you want to learn about a new topic, you will be more interested if there are anecdotes or a narrative. Stories help us better relate to the author, and therefore to the content.

• Teach. When it comes to your organization, you need to be the expert at what you do. And because you are the expert, people will want to know what you know. So teach them. Whatever your expertise, be it writing, cheese-making, or project management, you have the opportunity to teach your readers about what it is you do and help them become more reliant on their own.

• Inform. If there’s news happening about your organization, or even the broader industry, then you should break it, as journalists say. Don’t make it all about your PR, either. If you’re a food seller and there’s an outbreak of E. coli, tell people about it from your perspective. What are you doing to protect them and your product? There’s usually news—good and bad—about what your business does, so tell your customers so they’re in the know about that, too.

• Opine. This one is tricky, but every once in a while, you’re going to need to state your opinion on something affecting your business or the broader community. People will be looking to you for your opinion, and you’ll need to deliver it. But above all else, you must be fair-minded as you try to persuade others to see your point of view. And never launch into a personal attack. Not only will you draw fire from the target of the attack, but you will also turn readers off as being overly combative.

Social Networks

A social network is any website that lets people build profiles and then connect those profiles to each other.

Using their profiles, participants can share information and items that are important to them, such as text, links to other sites, photos, and videos.

There are four major social network sites in the U.S.: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and MySpace. Each site has its own culture, and as such, creating content on the site will have its unique challenges.

• Facebook is a robust and open platform for business. One of its most business-friendly features is Pages, which are essentially profiles for organizations instead of individual people.

Business pages essentially function as self-contained blogs within the larger Facebook framework. But they have some much cooler features, such as the capability to add applications to a Page, which in turn can expand the experience for your Page’s visitors.

• LinkedIn is a social network for professionals and a good place to communicate with your peers. Using connections within LinkedIn, you can reach out to fellow professionals and get direct information and share ideas in that manner.

• MySpace allows organizations to establish a presence within its network. Although there are no apps, you can blog within MySpace, so the blogging strategy listed earlier will still apply.

• Google Plus is a new social networking site in this list, relying on real-name profiles, which will help the network self-moderate. Based on the few commercial test accounts in the Google Plus network, it seems that Google Plus will offer profiles with the blog-like interface that other Google Plus users have. Content, therefore, can be tailored around the blogging model.

Other up and coming social network sites include the following:

• Quora is an online knowledge hub for mostly social media and technology questions. Ideally, Quora users ask questions about any particular topic, which are then answered by other users.

• Dispora is an open source site designed around the model that the users’ data belongs to them.

One feature that is prevalent on all of these sites (except for LinkedIn) is the ability for users to add their own content to a profile. By either commenting directly on your content, or posting a public message to you (such as on Facebook’s wall), this incoming content is a large part of what social media is all about. In Chapter 9, “Sharing with Rich Media,” we’ll discuss this type of rich content and explore how to encourage its use.

Microblogging

You may not have heard of “microblogging” before now, but it’s the term used to describe social media sites that are limited to 140 characters or less. As such, whatever your content is, it will need to be very, very pithy.

While it may be hard to master the microblog form, after a while it will become second nature. But microblogs are less about content than about connections—if you send a message that’s read by your followers, and a certain percentage of them resend that message to their followers (known as “retweeting” in Twitter-space), and so on, then suddenly you can reach hundreds of thousands of people with one message.

Don’t expect that instant viral effect all the time. In fact, it’s rare until you get a certain number of followers in a microblog network. That number is a bit indeterminate, but it’s true that those with more followers are going to have a certain bit of cache and will be retweeted more often.

It is important to remember, though, that you don’t want to use a microblog to just announce information about your business. Sure, you can point out your new blog entry, or a new sale, but also post things of interest: related news, topics that interest you and your customers, witty observations—all the things you would post in a regular blog, only much shorter.

Another good approach in a microblog service is reposting other people’s entries. If you see something that interests you, then retweet it yourself. It’s good manners, and there’s a little “pay it forward” going on there, too.

You will want to use microblogging for conversations, more than broadcasting information. The whole format is an extension of cell-phone texting, so it’s perfectly fine to have a Tweet be a public message to someone or many “someones.” Get those two-way conversations going, and you’ll find that a lot more interest will be generated toward what you have to say.

The Last Word

In this chapter, we reviewed the strategies needed to create and distribute really good social media content. These guidelines should give you a good place to start. The most important thing is to be disciplined. Don’t adhere to a rigorous schedule, but don’t wait three weeks between blog posts, either. Be consistent.

In Chapter 9, “Sharing with Rich Media,” we’ll examine how you can get content for your social media outlets that your users will provide. With photo and video sharing, suddenly you can collaborate on images and movies that will capture and hold audience attention for your business.